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Daphne Bramham: Search for authenticity shouldn’t be an excuse to gawk at abuse

Women from Ethiopia’s South Omo Valley are seen here dancing. They are also severely beaten as part of a coming of age ceremony that can be witnessed and photographed by wealthy tourists.

Photograph by: Andrew Renton
, Vancouver Sun

Bored with the usual round of museums, art galleries, cathedrals, temples or world heritage sites and with appetites whetted by documentaries, rich travellers are looking for authenticity.

Their desires have spawned a number of discrete and sometimes disturbing niche markets.

There are the adventurers. Images of tourists lined up to summit Everest, for example, are now almost as familiar as the images of their discarded oxygen bottles strewn at the Nepalese mountain’s base.

There’s poverty tourism (a.k.a. poor-ism or slum tourism) where seeing the living conditions of the desperately poor can be as life changing for the viewer as it is exploitative of the viewed.

There’s volun-tourism, where you pay to work for non-profit organizations such as Habitat for Humanity.

In Lac-Mégantic, Que., grieving people have come face-to-face with disaster tourists snapping photos of what and who has been left behind after the tragic and devastating train derailment and explosion.

And there’s the kind I discovered reading the weekend travel section of The Sun that’s perhaps best described as citizen-anthropologist trips. They’re cloaked as adventure tourism and wrapped in a self-congratulatory tolerance for other people’s traditions and customs.

In this case, it was the ritualized abuse of Hamer women in Ethiopia’s South Omo Valley.

Vancouver-based travel writer Andrew Renton described a three-day ceremony marking a young man’s coming of age that culminates with girls and women getting beaten and lashed so badly with sticks that they all bear the scars.

He recounts buying medication for one girl whose wounds had turned septic, “but she is still not happy” because the next day she was to be beaten again as part of her brother’s initiation ceremony.

The account is chilling.

“I find my girl and turn her around. Her eyes are glazed. Her back is running with blood. I’m told she took all the medication in preparation for today’s event.”

The italics are mine; the paternalistic possessive pronoun is Renton’s even though he viewed and recounted the beating of girls and women — black, African girls and women — with detachment.

His account and others describe the women and girls as being either drunk, drugged or in a trance during the beatings, which often go on for more than an hour.

No photos of the beatings of the scarred and bloodied backs of the girls and women were published in the paper. That would, no doubt, ruin the happy tourism buzz.

And, make no mistake, the writer wasn’t a lone, plucky adventurer who serendipitously happened upon this ritual during his nine days of playing citizen-anthropologist.

One photo shows nine other white, camera-toting tourists in the half-circle around the ceremony.

Think about it. What they witnessed would be criminal assault in Canada and most countries and probably even Ethiopia.

The story ended with this jaunty, verbal wave: “Whether you agree with the customs or not, the people and their traditions are real.”

This glib cultural relativism begs fundamental questions.

Is it morally right to do nothing when another person or even an animal is being beaten so badly that they’re left bleeding and scarred?

Are rural Ethiopian women and girls (or any others in the developing world) not entitled to the same rights and protections as Canadians?

The coming-of-age ritual may well be an ancient one. But it’s one of the many reasons that Ethiopia is one of the worst countries to be a girl or a woman, ranking 173 out of 187 countries when it comes to gender inequality.

Another old custom/tradition in Ethiopian herding societies is the most extreme form of female genital mutilation, which entails the removal of all external genitalia.

The United Nations unanimously passed a resolution last December calling for a global ban on the practice, which UNICEF says is rampant in Ethiopia’s rural areas even though it has been outlawed.

So far, there are no reports of this ritual being carried out in front of tourists.

But in a country so desperately poor, who’s to say what people may be willing to do for money?

For the writer’s brief look at real life in the South Omo Valley, he paid nearly 10 times what the average Ethiopian earns in a year. His $3,300 “covered absolutely everything for nine days except alcohol.”

It’s a fair bet that very little of what the gawking travel writer and other tourists paid to witness the abuse will trickle down to girls like the poor, wretched one described in the article.

Yet, for the Ethiopian herders living at the desperate margins even a pittance can make a difference.

The troubling question is what kind of difference?

If rich Westerners pay high prices and set aside their own cultural values to watch ritualized abuse, it’s possible that rather than being impartial observers their very presence exacerbates and may even perpetuate it.

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